Delegation from Mexican sister city of Mante coming to Boulder

Medical mission to Mante is again canceled this year

Dr. Sarvjit Gill, right, takes a photo of Yolanda Almazan, a 15-year-old from a town of indigenous people near Tampico, Mexico, during the 2005 medical mission to Mante, Mexico, from Boulder. Almazan had a tumor in her sinus that needed surgery to repair.
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JOSHUA LAWTON
)

Drug violence continues to make Mante too dangerous for Boulder volunteers to resume their annual medical mission to the small Mexican city, but later this month, a delegation from Mante will visit Boulder to reaffirm the 20-year relationship between the two communities.

The 15-member group, led by Dr. David Rodriguez, a founder of the medical mission, will be in Boulder from March 31 to April 5 and will meet with a variety of community groups, including Boulder Community Hospital officials.

The medical mission, started in 1990, is sponsored by the hospital, the Rotary Club and First Presbyterian Church. Mante, located in a sugar-growing region in the Gulf Coast state of Tamaulipas, became one of Boulder's sister cities in 2000.

But after helping tens of thousands of people over 20 years, the 2011 and 2012 missions were canceled due to safety concerns, and it's not clear when they'll be able to resume.

Jean Bedell, vice president of the Boulder-Mante Sister City Committee and a nurse who has been on every Mante mission since the first one, said it's been painful for people from both communities to not be able to do the trip.

The visit later this month will be the first official face-to-face contact between the communities since the 2010 medical mission.

Many other U.S. medical and religious missions that built houses, tended the sick and conducted goodwill activities also have been forced to cut back or cancel trips.

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"The numbers have really dropped off in terms of people going to Mexico," said David Armstrong, director of operations for Mission Data International, a group in Arkansas that tracks foreign religious missions.

At least 50,000 people have died in Mexico since late 2006, when center-right President Felipe Calderon came to office and launched an assault on drug traffickers.

Tamaulipas, which shares a 143-mile border with Texas, is one of Mexico's most homicidal states. It tallied 1,108 murders last year, 8.5 percent of Mexico's total homicides for 2011.

Tamaulipas is one of 13 Mexican states for which the U.S. State Department has issued travel warnings advising against all nonessential travel.

Bedell said there have been hundreds of murders in the Mante area, including attacks on school children. Mante lies along a major drug-trafficking route and has been the site of battles between competing gangs.

Bedell said the city is "unbelievably unsafe," and she expects it will be at least another two years before a medical mission returns to the city from Boulder. When the trip does resume, it probably will be a smaller group to test the waters.

From its start in 1990, the mission had grown to include around 100 volunteers who served roughly 6,000 people during the weeklong trip. In operating rooms set up in a 40-foot trailer, surgeons would perform 300 cataract surgeries and 300 general surgeries, from gall bladder removals to cleft palate repairs to hysterectomies. Physical therapists would meet with 300 to 400 patients, and 250 hearing aids would be fitted.

"They understand why we can't come, but they're saddened because most of these people don't have access to any other medical care," Bedell said.

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